Getting lost in the DSO, Info packages, Infocubes, and the Aggregation?
Yes, SAP Monitoring and Alerting Infrastructure (MAI) has made SAP alerts much harder to find! If you don't believe me, try finding actual SAP Netweaver-managed system alerts in Solman, like an actual ABAP dump, or a Syslog event. What you see in Solman Alert Inbox are not raw alerts but summarized objects and counters, you still need to figure out when an alert actually happened on the managed system and where to find it.
Look at our various publications for background information:
- SAP Solution Manager Technical Monitoring
- Basis or Basics?
- Netweaver on HANA Monitoring Setup (3 parts)
- How to Select your SAP Monitoring Tools
Oh the "One Truth"!
Our users and subscribers get plenty of questions about SAP MAI and whether we monitor MAI data. This is a philosophical question. If the source is already aggregated, why would you want to propagate it? Remember SAP is trying to simplify with "One truth" by not aggregating (of course we're talking about HANA), but why is Solman (including Solman on HANA) doing the opposite by aggregating monitoring data.? That should be the task of the analytical layer, not the collection & data source processing layer.
CCMS is the underlying instrumentation technology in all SAP Netweaver apps, so whether you use MAI or not you have to use CCMS to extract the raw alerts and metrics. SAP is saying CCMS is going away. Well unless all Netweaver systems are going away, I don't see it happening in the next 5 or maybe even 10 years.
MAI usually is part of the SAP Solution Manager. SAP today does not expose Solution Manager MAI data via API to 3rd party monitoring except for BAdl to externalize some alerts via SNMP traps. On the other hand, SAP CCMS data in Netweaver products that are exposed via a certified BC-XAL (External Alert & Monitoring) interface.
Myth Buster...
Please chime in, but this myth needs to be debunked. MAI is NOT solving the Monitoring and Alerting problems, at least not effectively by aggregating alerts and metrics. Maybe in Solman 7.2 - just maybe. Those alerts and metrics need to be present to make an effective root-cause analysis (see our post on SAP Performance Best Practices).
